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This seminar considers American documentary andÌýafterlives. It seeks to provide students with an in-depth account of the emergence of documentary in the US in the 1930s and the political and social claims made for documentary by art historians and artists today. The seminar, in turn, has a double focus: to study and understand the moment of American documentary’s ‘invention’ in the 1930s and to think through how and why that invention has (or has not) been 'reinvented', to borrow the term coined by the photographer Allan Sekula in the late 1970s. This is a seminar about the politics of writing a history of a social form.Ìý

Opening with a consideration of the wealth of recent debates about documentary, we will begin by carving out a working definition of a document and documentary. These definitions will frame our study of the diverse range of photographic, filmic and journalistic practices that emerged in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, including Robert Flaherty’s ethnographies, Lewis Hine’s work for the National Child Labor Committee and the films of The Workers Film and Photo League. With an expanded understanding of documentary and its discourse in place, students will then be asked to focus their attention on a few celebrated books and films produced between 1937 and 1941. Central to our concerns will be the collaborative nature of documentary work—photographers and filmmakers worked with novelists, poets, journalists and sociologists on their productions—as well as the ways in which the work we have come to call documentary circulated—namely, on the page or the screen, in print. In short, we will consider how this work produced and defined its public. Finally, the seminar will close by returning to our initial questions about the ‘reinvention’ of documentary now by thinking through the legacies and afterlives of documentary in the 1960s and 1970s.

Throughout the seminar we will test our understanding of documentary against histories and theories of modernism, the avant-garde, mass media and propaganda. We will also consider the ethical and political debates about documentary and its uses, both past and present. Students will be asked to develop a historical understanding of documentary and to think critically about the ways in which it has been historicised.